Open Air Wireless

Well, I should have followed my gut. Wanted to get internet service with someone local. Small business champion. Keep my money local. I saw the negative reviews but thought, nope going to give them a chance. Their website says they cover my area so I gave them a call. Three weeks of ME having to call THEM to get service. They talk a good game, oh we’re building a new tower and we were out all day. Worst communication ever. Finally today after I called them YET AGAIN. They finally called me back only to say… wait for it. We can’t service your area. Yep. 3 weeks. I’m the idiot. When they never called back, when I had to basically chase them down to get answers. I wouldn’t put up with that from anyone, but I did from them because I need internet and will not do that horrible comcast and AT&T didn’t really sound like a good alternative Besides, I really believe in supporting small business. What a sucker I am. I bet they’re laughing their *&&^*^ off in the office stating how they kept me dangling for 3 weeks. Run don’t walk folks

Open air wireless has been a pleasure to work with. Everything was thoroughly explained when they came out to install our equipment. They were prompt and efficient. They were even able to move up my appointment time at my last minute request. And so far the bandwidth we’ve seen at our house has been more than enough for our needs. Thanks for the great service guys! Keep up the good work!

Called and asked if they serviced my new location as we were moving. We wanted to use a local/​small business company vs. Comcast/AT&T. Was told I’d get a call back once they checked if the tower reached the new house, that was 2 weeks ago, Comcast already came and installed.

(4÷10÷15) Upgraded to 5 stars. The issues mentioned in my original review, below, have been resolved. Matt has consistently shown excellent customer service. He’s upgraded bandwidth as requested. The few issue we’ve had have been quickly dealt with. Our ping times and bandwidth are consistent (I know because my server logs ping times continually), and when the network suffers Matt is reachable and provides very quick response time. HD video streaming is a reality, even in rural McHenry county, and I don’t even have to deal with ATT or Comcast.
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Original review follows: We have been a customer of Open Air Wireless since 2010. Matt, the owner, runs a quality service and we have been very happy with them. Reliability for a wireless provider has been excellent — I doubt reliability will ever be as good as a wired or fiber provider, but Matt works hard to keep service up and running.
We have been customers of several other wireless services over the last 10 years, but were always disappointed in the service they provided. Dropped connections, extremely limited bandwidth, and wildly varying latency limited our online activities to web surfing and email — certainly not streaming video or VOIP. Over that frustrating period, I decided to utilize our server to continuously monitor our ping time, and saw just how bad the service we were receiving was. Open Air Wireless, which has been continually monitored by me for the last 3 years, has very stable ping times, good sustained download speeds, and very good reliability. The connection is stable and fast enough to watch streaming video with medium-​high resolution from Netflix and Amazon. We have had limited success with VOIP but perhaps we are too picky with audio quality.
So why not 5 stars? Open Air Wireless is so close to 5 stars, but not quite there yet. There are 2 improvements which could be made:
1) We’ve been asking for more bandwidth — would like to be able to watch full HD videos but we can’t quite do that yet. We’d like Comcast like bandwidth — not realistic in our rural setting, but a speed bump from 3.5Mbps to 5.0Mbps would make a big difference.
2) The other issue, more out of OAW control but a frustration nonetheless, are the relatively rare outages. Matt is very responsive and outages typically end quickly, but it seems as if some could be avoided (better UPS… more farmer training…).
Summary: we feel very fortunate to have an excellent service provider like Open Air Wireless. We’d like to contribute to their growth and have been actively promoting them to others in our rural subdivision and surrounding area. Good job Matt!